Analysis of a direct-sequence spread-spectrum cellular radio system

The uplink and downlink performance of a digital cellular radio system that uses direct sequence code division multiple access is evaluated. Approximate expressions are derived for the area averaged bit error probability while accounting for the effects of path loss, log-normal shadowing, multipath-fading, multiple-access interference, and background noise. Three differentially coherent receivers are considered: a multipath rejection receiver, a RAKE receiver with predetection selective diversity combining, and a RAKE receiver with postdetection equal gain combining. The RAKE receivers are shown to improve the performance significantly, except when the channel consists of a single faded path. Error correction coding is also shown to substantially improve the performance, except for slowly fading channels